Sabri Oncu wrote:
>
> Let me play Alan Sokal here:
>
> Dear Jamil, I enjoyed many a posts from you and hopefully we will get
> together one of these days and I am sure we have a lot to share but let me
> tell you this:
>
> I don't have a clue about what you say below.
>
> By the way Carrol,
>
> What is wrong with Eucledian senses? I used to love Eucledian spaces a lot.
> They have many nice properties. Not that I don't like non-Eucledian spaces.
> They have many nice many nice properties too.
>
> Have you ever heard about covariant derivatives of cotravariant components?
> They are closely associated with non-Eucledean senses!
Nothing is wrong with Euclidean spaces -- and as Doug pointed out, even
Euclidean spaces contain figures with more than one center. So I guess
even if you treat the metaphor of "center" as live it doesn't give what
Rob wants. There is no way to talk about the world sensibly without
frequent (implicit or explicit) invocation of "the many-centered." I
guess I wrote the post too casually, so I won't compound the confusion
by trying to paraphrase at length now. In general I was affirming (a)
that of course many (all?) things are many-centered and (b) there was
nothing particularly revolutionary (post-modern) about that perception.
And no -- my technical knowledge of math doesn't extend beyond calculus,
so I haven't a clue as to what "covariant derivatives of cotravariant
components" are, but they sound interesting. Is "cotravariant" a
misprint for "contravariant"?
Carrol
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